Quality assurance indicators for school transformation: a paradigm shift

Abstract

The new millennium is witnessing a lot of transformational challenges in almost all realms of life including the educational system, bringing about world class standards. Consequently, education reform has become necessary in pursuance of educational quality and effectiveness. Unfortunately most educational reforms in the past decades have resulted in serious frustration and failure even though they are often based on good will. This discourse will highlight the need for transformation in education in terms of Quality Assurance (QA) indicators for quality education that is currently experiencing three waves. The different waves are based on the different paradigms and theories of education quality and school effectiveness, and they result in different strategies and approaches to education quality assurance. The first wave of school transformation focuses mainly on Internal Quality Assurance Indicators and makes effort to improve internal school performances particularly the methods and processes of teaching and learning. The second wave emphasizes Interface Quality Assurance in terms of organizational effectiveness, stakeholders' satisfaction and market competitiveness and makes effort to ensure satisfaction and accountability to the internal and external stakeholders. This paper further explained that school transformation should move towards the third wave which emphasizes strongly Future Quality Assurance Indicators in terms of relevance to the new school functions in the new century, as well as relevance to the new paradigm shift in education concerning contextualized multiple intelligences (CMI), globalization, localization and individualization. Based on the paradigm shift, a new QA indicator in terms of value added and value created indicators which are completely different are added to the list. The enhancement of value added depends heavily on improvement of internal processes while value created relies mainly on the increase in goal relevance and stakeholder satisfaction with quality of education services. Continuous institutional development becomes necessary for total QA in the secondary school system and quality management of the new secondary school curriculum that emphasises entrepreneurship education. Consequently, transformation from the traditional ways of school management, to new creative and innovative approach, such as introduction of Tripartite Curriculum for inculcating multiple intelligences, instead of mono-intelligence that is currently prevalent in the Nigerian secondary school curriculum, is therefore advocated for. so that the current paradigm shift to a new secondary school curriculum in Nigerian will surely be a success.